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ccady writes "Mozilla 1.7 beta is out. Not too many new features, but "Mozilla 1.7 size and performance have improved dramatically with this release. When compared to Mozilla 1.6, Mozilla 1.7 Beta is 7% faster at startup, is 8% faster at window open time, has 9% faster pageloading times, and is 5% smaller in binary size." I'll be downloading it."

> I used to change my user agent to say it was running IE on CP/M-86.....

I like to play fun games with my ua string, too. One of my favourite tricksis to claim to be running my browser on an X11 GUI on PC-DOS 3.3, but claimingMSIE on X11 is fun too (especially, MSIE on an X11 GUI on a Microsoft OS).Other user-agent jokes I've seen include the following:* Claim to be running a significantly future version, (e.g., claim MSIE 11.5
or Mozilla/7.0 or use a future Gecko build date, et cetera)* Claim to be both MSIE and Gecko in the same user-agent string* List Emacs as the operating system* List Klingon, Quenya, or Sanskrit as the localization language* Claim an utterly impossible browser/OS/hardware combo, like iCab on
OpenVMS on SPARC, or, even better, claim a combination that's not only
impossible but also ancient, like NCSA Mosaic on ITS on a PDP8.* Claim a virtual machine architecture (e.g., the z-machine, glulx,
parrot, jvm,... anything that's never been implemented in hardware)
as your hardware architecture.* Make wrong and incompitible version claims (e.g., start with Mozilla/2.0
and then give a 2003 Gecko build date or claim to be MSIE 6.0)* Claim to be running on Hurd, BeOS 6, or some other vaporware.* "NoBrowserNeeded (My TCP/IP stack is connected directly to my brain.)"

I've heard rumors of sites rejecting non-IE browsers, but I have yet to find one myself.

I am forced to change my browser header for one site on a regular basis. The site to pay one of my credit card bills barfs without IE, it says my browser (Mozilla) is uncompatible with the site. So I use the prefbar plugin to change the browser ID to IE and everything works well. Their tech support never got back to me when I told them this. Mozilla still will not work unless I change how it reports itself to their server.

How can something with the same kernel, and the same ancestry go the other way: Mozilla actually improves as it evolves.

Mozilla is a descendant, of sorts, of the Netscape 4 browser. OTOH, it doesn't have any real inherited code--and Netscape 6 and 7 were just repackaged Mozilla that did, AFAIK, get smaller and faster with each iternation, just like Moz did.

How can something with the same kernel, and the same ancestry go the other way: Mozilla actually improves as it evolves.

Because it doesn't have the same kernel.

Back in 1998, when Netscape released their code, the open-source community soon realized that they would have to throw much of it away and start from scratch. By throwing out the cruft that had been building up since Netscape 1.0, the Mozilla team was able to build a better browser...eventually. (Check out this BBC article [bbc.co.uk] for a nice pre-history of Mozilla.)

Back in 1998, when Netscape released their code, the open-source community soon realized that they would have to throw much of it away and start from scratch.

Actually, that's a bit of myth. It was really Netscape's management who dictated the rewrite, in order to accomodate the Gecko rendering engine (which was still called NGLayout or Raptor back then). Most of the Netscape/Mozilla developers (less than six months into the project, there were not many non-Netscape contributors) at the time were against the change, not because they didn't like the idea of a smaller, faster and more standards-complaint rendering engine, but because they were given a ludicrous six-month timeframe to achieve parity with Netscape Communicator 4.5.

I think Mozilla has reached the point where it can't really get much more advanced feature-wise until other issues are addressed - such as size and performance. There is so much crammed into the suite that reorganisation is going to take a while, and I think that influence from Firefox has made some people sit up and take notice.

Does anyone else see the same behavior I do; that while it starts out snappy, Mozilla gets slower and slower. This is most noticable when rendering tabs in the background; this goes from instantaneous to taking the better part of a minute.

The slowdown from snappy to slow takes a day or two of use, and requires a restart of the browser to fix.

This happens both in mozilla and fire-fox, so it must be some internal resource leak, I guessing.

It seems to me to only be a problem when I have a lot of data open at once, and leave it alone long enough for windows to swap it out to the drive.

For instance, I have a tab link that, when clicked, loads 63 comics pages at once. It significantly reduces my time spent reading comics (waiting for them to load, actually) but it's a TON of memory.

If I let my laptop hibernate and bring it back up it takes nearly 30-60 seconds to render the tab that was on top when I hibernated. After I read the first few and close a few tabs it speeds back up to its normal speed. I suspect it's more an issue with mozilla using a huge amount of memory (possibly for holding rendered versions of web pages) that is swapped out.

Using it interactively, even after having it open for several days, it's about as fast for me as when I first started it.

I seriously doubt that a performance improvement 10% is even noticeable to the user. It's great that Mozilla is trying to catch up with fast browse-only alternatives like Safari, Konqueror and also the Gecko-based browsers, but you can't seriously speak of 'dramatic' improvements.

Sure. A performace improvement of 10% is probably totally unnoticable to the user. The real point that the article fails to make is that Mozilla has been getting *consistently* smaller and faster since the 1.0 release. Subjectivley, it's pretty obvious if you use an older release that it's slower. But if that isn't good enough, there are graphs on tinderbox which show the measured codesize, pageload time, new window time and various other metrics (no link, because it would be irresponsible of me to launch an accidental ddos attack on tinderbox) - if you're interested the address is pretty easy to guess/find. Looking at the btek pageload time, I see that in June 2002 pageload was around 1210ms, now it's around 860ms and still decreasing. That's an improvment of around 30%, without cutting any features or degrading the standards support. That means that Mozilla is now competative with so called "lightweight" browsers such as Opera (I don't have comparisons avaliable because such things are hard to do).

but single-digit percentage increases in performance isn't "dramatic". It's more like "scarcely noticeable".

In that case, maybe... But if you follow some compiler conference papers, single digit percentage of improvement *is* a dramatic improvement.

More than that single digit, we need to either change the underlying algorithm, or do a more dramatic overhaul, or correct a resource hogging mistakes. Well, we all know that Mozilla coders aren't that sloppy, so I guess that single digit improvements are really good because they usually involve quite a lot of cutting corners squeezing out more improvements over the already tight code.

Back when I designed graphics accelerators for a living we did a whole bunch of work trying to figure out what 'faster' ment - at least from a subjective point of view - turns out if you graph actual performance to subjective performance there's sort of an S curve, on the left it's dog slow and people are just annoyed, on the right it's so fast people don't notice performance is an issue at all and in the middle there's a vaguely exponential region where if every time you make things ten times faster they think it got better, maybe by a subjective factor of 2.... 10% is in the noise.... unless your UI is in that far left dog-slow region

I'm really impressed, and very much appreciative, of the amount of effort the Mozilla team has put forth over the years. I switched to Mozilla some 4 or 5 years ago, and haven't looked back since. The rapidity of development is truly astounding -- thanks girls and guys!

That having been said, I've been dissapointed with the latest iteration of the Mozilla browser. I've found 1.6 to be rather slow (autocomplete lags, for example), bug prone and (if I'm correct) java support is still on the fritz.

I'm liable to switch over to FireFox (or whatever it's called this week), except the Preference Toolbar (on which I'm hooked like a crack addiction) still does not function in this stripped down version of the Moz browser.

Anyway, I look forward to this newest version; really, I just wanted to express, in this post, my thanks for the effort put forth by the whole Moz team.

How much faster in comparision to other releases? What I want to know is if Mozilla is progressively getting faster, or is this just to compensate for performance regressions when they went from 1.4 - 1.5, etc.

I've been using Mozilla since 0.4 or 0.5, can't quite remember which. It's always been the best, and keeps getting better (tabs anyone?). Every release gets faster, and most get smaller, though not all.

Seeing as Firefox is getting most of the press these days it's important to realise that the full suite is still moving along nicely. They are addressing criticisms well - a redesign of the cookie manager and speed increases are reflective of the fight against bloat and complexity.

And don't forget, changes to the suite are picked up by Firefox since FF is based off the same source tree. So a lot of work here will affect the mini-moz too....

No-one is going to notice a 10% improvement. It is a non-factor. You need to double performance to make a noticeable difference. Granted, if they keep on improving by 10% each release, it will eventually be really good, but don't call a 10% improvement "dramatic" (or whatever the original author called it).

The latest Galeon is out too [sourceforge.net]. Version 1.3.14. Works with Mozilla 1.4 through 1.7b and trunk. Loads pretty fast too;) For those of you who don't know, galeon is a browser based on mozilla, for gnome-but ofcourse works in other wm's too.

Does anybody know why they stopped putting Talkback into the OS X pre-release versions since 1.6 alpha? I thought that was supposed to help them find crashing bugs. Kind of hard to do when you forget to put it in there in the first place.

Does anybody know why they stopped putting Talkback into the OS X pre-release versions since 1.6 alpha? I thought that was supposed to help them find crashing bugs. Kind of hard to do when you forget to put it in there in the first place.

I can't speak for OS X, but as for Windows, I inquired about the removal of the talkback feature in the nightly builds they had this to say about it: [mozillazine.org]

No, it's not possible to enable it. It's either built into the official builds or its not. Currently the official builds are not being built with talkback because of some talkback server issues, so there is no way to disable it. Hopefully by Firebird 0.9 all of the talkback issues will be sorted, but it's probably not going to happen for the Firebird 0.8 release.

Though if you page down it appears that we shall see it in this release of Mozilla

"Mozilla 1.7 size and performance have improved dramatically with this release. When compared to Mozilla 1.6, Mozilla 1.7 Beta is 7% faster at startup, is 8% faster at window open time, has 9% faster pageloading times, and is 5% smaller in binary size."

It would seem that the definition of "dramatic" just got marginalized. Personally I'd think of a 2x performance increase as dramatic. 1.1x is what I'd term "laudable".

I assume these speed changes will be transferred over to Firefox as well, since it uses the Mozilla code base. That will likely make Firefox amazingly fast, since it's already faster than the stock Mozilla.

22 January 2004: We are in the process of driving the Camino 0.8 buglist to zarro boogs. We will be branching off Mozilla 1.7 (now scheduled for April) and will release shortly after. We expect Camino 0.8 to be faster and even more solid than 0.7...

I use Mozilla, Firefox, and Thunderbird too - they're my favorites. But I can't build for Mozilla. I have to build for IE. My clients use IE, the visitors use IE and that makes it the standard (even though it doesn't follow the "standards").

It's an uphill battle, I'm afraid. That said, I'll be downloading this new version ASAP.

Sad, but true. However, once one tries Mozilla, IE looks old and lame in comparison. I mean, Tabbed browsing is the best. Plus, you don't have VB tied into Mozilla like it is with IE, so, the virus issue is limited somewhat...

Moz is the one that ends up looking lame when banking sites stop working, personal pages no longer render and etc.

If a bank site doesn't work properly in anything other than IE, I usually send them an email linking to articles about serious security holes in IE, usually including the SSL certificate one, and tell them they should tune their site to run in all browsers, as some of us are too knowledgeable to want to use something as crappy as IE for online banking.

It's a never ending circle - designers who don't know anything about web standards and have only ever used IE make sites that only work in IE - people try a new browser like Mozilla, and see that their favourite sites are "broken" in the new browser (when really it's because the sites were built to work around the non-compliant IE) - so they go back to IE...
That said I've found Firefox does a pretty good job of rendering most pages well.

The Mozilla suite and the Firefox, K-meleon, and Camino browsers all use the Gecko engine. The Konqueror and Safari browsers use the KHTML engine. Apparently, the KHTML developers have a more pragmatic policy with respect to implementing MSHTML extensions *cough*document.all*cough* than the more standards-minded Gecko developers.

Apparently, the KHTML developers have a more pragmatic policy with respect to implementing MSHTML extensions *cough*document.all*cough* than the more standards-minded Gecko developers.

There are good reasons for not implementing that. Implementing just document.all does nothing for IE-compatibility, since you have to implement the rest of the MS Document Object Model to actually get things done. Once you do that you would have three DOM implementations, the mozilla native one, the W3C one, and the IE one. All three would have to be maintained, and you'd need to constantly chase every new release of IE (though with IE's current lethargy this is less of a problem). Also, it's impossible to have perfect IE compatibility. IE for mac was a different engine, and wasn't anymore compatible with windows IE than mozilla is. You need to not only implement the same features, but you have to implement the same bugs, the same way of responding to error conditions, the same timing of screen updating behaviors.

Gecko's design is a very good trade-off between standards and compatibility. Dave Hyatt has stated on his weblog he tries to do things the gecko way often (looking to gecko for guidance on how to do a compromise). And safari pretends to be gecko in its useragent string.

Anyway, if a site doesn't work in mozilla, you can file it as a bug. If it can be fixed in the engine without breaking standards compatibility and a lot of sites would benefit from that fix, it probably will be. Otherwise it will become an evangelism bug, and mozilla people will contact the site to advise them how to become mozilla-compatible.

I code to the standards first and then verify it looks right with both IE and Mozilla (and Opera, and Lynx, and Konquerer). If something doesn't work with both I either remove it, tweak it until it's right, or use something like XSLT to generate the proper HTML for the given browser. It's more effort but it generally results in better code all around. If it's just CSS that is the problem I just have the site choose the desired stylesheet based on the browser used or let the user choose their own stylesheet from a list.

IE's CSS support has gotten better in recent releases but it's still not on par with Mozilla's support. For most things though it seems good enough to just use standard HTML/CSS without any IEisms. IE still isn't very PNG friendly though which is an ongoing annoyance for me.

Overall though it's not really a problem to just code to the standard. Coding to IE is problematic because it's a standard that changes with each release.

No, they don't agree. I enjoy a good looking site. Not only do such sites (as you describe) usually look boring, but they tend to lack rich functionality. I want a site that is usable, rich in content, functionality and looks good. You can do that and still support other browsers, but if it's a choice between supporting some random browser or having a great site - then screw the random browser.

The problem is everybody is laboring under the delusion that they're a fricken designer because they can recognize a nice site when they see one. Sometimes its the designer and sometimes its the client and often its both.

There's a huge gulf between being able to see that a site is good and bad and being able to produce a good site oneself. Unfortunately, once a non-pro gets his ego invested in something, he can't be objective anymore. A real pro can walk away from something he thought was great because, (a) he's there to accomplish somethign for the customer, no t just feeding his ego, (b) he knows there's plenty more where that came from and (c) he'll have a chance to try his brilliant design on the next customer.

MikeFM goes to far. There's a big differnce between realizing that most designs suck and thinking design itself sucks. Since I am not a graphic artist, when I have to design a web interface I follow three rules: (1) keep it simple (2)steal from clean designs I admire to the greatest degree compatible with [1] (3) Put as muc of the design into CSS as I can, consistent with my understandign of CSS. It pretty much guarantees acceptable mediocrity, which is pretty good for a non artist.

The only problems I have with them come from boneheaded websites that check the browser and then refuse to allow any none IE browser to access the site. How clueless is that.

Not as clueless as the ones that claim to do such
a check, and then reject you for not having the very browser that in fact you are
using. (They claimed to support IE and
Mozilla, then rejected Mozilla 1.6 (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113)

I ran into one of those yesterday on a sporting
goods sales site... wrote them a nastygram quoting
their rejection-page back to them, together with
my browser identity, then
asking whether I should expect the same kind
of bullshit from their merchandise that I find
in their web site design.

The problem is that the "in theory Flash could be useful" argument is used to justify a huge range of websites that, frankly, are a pain in the ass to use, load slowly, are uncomfortable for users of older computers, and exclude the disabled and users of alternate browsers or people that disable plugins for security reasons.

In my entire life, I have seen *one* website that used Flash in what I could consider a significantly beneficial manner, and I have seen many, many websites in my life. The website was for an MP3 player, and one could try out the interface in an embedded Flash object. The rest of the site did not use Flash. There was no equally effective way to reproduce this functionality without Flash, the functionality was clearly important to the product (the product was partly being sold based on having a good interface), and a user without Flash still had the ability to work with the rest of the website.

On the whole, I have seen so little effective use of Flash, and taking into consideration the significant drawbacks of it, that if someone asked me whether to use Flash on their site, I would feel comfortable simply saying "no". The odds of it being a good idea are so phenomenally low that it's just not worth trying.

That's fine. But I bet it looks like ass. The web - not the Internet as a while - the web - is a visual medium. Sites like www.mezzoblue.com or those featured at www.webstandardsawards.com are accessible and stylish. You can still view them if you want to disable images, CSS and JS, but for those of us in the modern, broadband enabled age, we can have an interesting visual experience and still be entertained by good content.

I disagree. I've yet to find one person who raves about how "stylish" and "good-looking" a web site is an then points to a website that isn't a pain in the ass to use.

Let's take a look at your mezzoblue.com example:

* Uses inconsistent highlighting -- background rollovers (ugh) on part of the text like the "also available" websites, underline rollovers on other parts like the "Designing with Web Standards" link.

* It uses images for text in its heading. At the moment, I am sitting back fram my computer and leaning on a recliner. My face is about 1.5 to 2 times my normal viewing distance, and I use 1152x864 on a 17" monitor, which is already a high resolution. Normally, I just bump up the text size and have no problem reading a website (as do disabled people). This website's topic entries are unreadable to me, and I had to lean forward plop my face right next to the screen to read the "also available" heading. Heck, that's damned small text even for a lot of glasses-wearing older folks that I know of, with no way to work around it.

* The site uses rollover menus. I don't think I know *anyone* that likes using rollover menus -- I *really* hate it. It doesn't even use your typical old annoying rollover menu -- this has an image background or something. It took ten seconds or so for the image to load, so I had floating white text on a light blue background for a bit. It was pretty unusable.

* Widget functionality is unclear to a viewer. Once again, the analysis I've heard of rollovers holds true -- they're used by designers that have such an unintuitive design that they require the user to wave the mouse around over the interface to figure out how it works. There are rollover menus in the upper top corner. There's no visual indication that these little dinky images are, in fact, rollover menus. It wasn't until I started scanning the page with my mouse cursor that I figured it out.

* Confusingly chosen and similar visual indicators. The mezzoblue.com site uses a diagonally-upward-aiming triangle to indicate a menu (*most* of the time). For starters, this indicator is inconsistent with the common desktop use of a downward-aiming triangle to indicate a popup menu. It is also almost identical to the diagonally-downward-aiming triangle that is used to indicate a section header *on the same site*. Not only that, diagonal triangles most common use in current HCI is for a half-open expandable section of data, a convention from Mac OS. The sections look like they *might* roll up when clicked, but do not in fact do so.

* Dissimilar widgets are visually identical. If this designer *had* to make rollover menus and grokked HCI (a dubious pair of bedfellows to begin with), he'd know that one does not make widgets that operate differently but appear identical to the user. Up at the top, we have three blocks of text that appear the same (upward-diagonal triangle, text). The first two ("about", "weblog") are rollover menus. The third, "contact", is a link. When I started rolling my cursor over them, I sat and waited on this link, assuming that my browser was just slow to pop up the associated menu.

* Text colors poorly chosen for readability. Much of the text/background combinations involve two very similar shades of blue. Most of this is readable to me at my current viewing distance if I increase the size, but I know many people that would *not* be able to comfortably read such text.

Honestly, mezzoblue.com seems an excellent example of why sites should *not* be "stylish" -- when designers use "stylish" as an excuse, they're frequently making websites that are simply poorly built from an interface point of view.

Finally, as I've argued before, a lot of people making "stylish" websites with "extra zazz" are people that are familiar with the conventional way products are sold. Most products need to appear flashy, interesting, and novel just long enough for a person to impulsively choose to buy them. For conventional products, "flash" h

Wrong, W3C sets the standard and their browser is the standard. You do not have to use superstandard methods like activeX to make a working webpage, so don't.IE is not a standard, and won't be unless Microsoft buys it's way into being a standards organization.

Admittedly, I get most of my site's hits from Slashdot, but I find a rather pleasant mix of Gecko, Mozilla, Opera, Apple Webkit, and occasionally someone using IE. Actually, I think Google surfs my site more than anyone. (I did tell "Slurp" to take a flying leap.) Of course it does flop over to nearly 80% IE from time to time, but I've also noticed that IE users are only interested in some file named cmd.exe or root.exe, and I've never offered either of those files from this box. It must be a Microsoft thing...

Personally I'm hooked on using Firefox, but I design my pages to look good in any light.;-)

But I can't build for Mozilla. I have to build for IE. My clients use IE, the visitors use IE and that makes it the standard (even though it doesn't follow the "standards").

Ya know, I find that a funny statement.

I manage a software development group, and we have to build for IE too. But we also have to make sure our software works with Mozilla. And for Opera, and Mac, and everything else. We support all "modern" browsers (basicly, verions >=5)

You see, we can't really dictate a browser, and we're not interested in getting locked into one vendor product. We want to remain flexible for the future, and we want to remain reliable when a new browser hits the market.

So we support all browsers.

Happily, this is a very minor expense. In fact, as project manager, I can say with confidence that it costs us well under 1/1000th of our development budget. The only difficulty is to get contractors and new employees to use web standards.

In the end, our maintenance costs are lower, and our user satisfaction is sky high. We never ever get complaints about browser compatibility.... not even once in over 4 years of high-volume operation.

Oh yeah, and our apps look and work damned good too.

So what's the deal? What is wrong with organizations that can't support regular browsers without undo expense and difficulty???

I run a site that's for a windows app, so there's a majority of Windows users (I'd guess almost exclusively windows actually) visiting it... you'd expect a very high IE percentage there, but I've currently got (based on ~1.2 million hits):

IE6 60%Mozilla 11%IE5 6%IE5.5 2.3%Opera7.2 1.7%Opera7.1 0.3%

The rest is made up of sundry bots and capture scripts.

Looking at those stats... why the $$% do people target IE5 over mozilla??? (I'd love to know why IE5 is 3 times more popular than 5.5, too...)

For the most part, the web applications I work on don't have complex enough user interface requirements that the differences are that significant, but most of the time I've taken the exact opposite approach.

Essentially, because MSIE butchers the standards, I know from experience that if I develop and test my code using MSIE it often barfs on anything else. If I code on Moz, because it's pretty well standards compliant, 99% of the time it works straight out of the box in IE too.

I'd still develop under Moz if that wasn't true, though. To get a context menu item that'll tell me* What form fields are around and what values they have* What images the page contains* What links the page contains

saves a _lot_ of hassle. Can they please fix the bug, though, that causes a new HTTP request if I want to view the source? Why can't it just use cached HTML?

Basically, the Any Browser campaign says to write everything to HTML 4.01 "Strict". Use CSS for all layout. Mozilla development fits this very nicely. Check out Eric Meyer's [meyerweb.com] CSS/EDGE [meyerweb.com]. Everything at CSS/Edge fits with the "AnyBrowser" way of doing things, but yet not everything at CSS/Edge will load with Internet Explorer.

In my own less complex pages, I've found that I can make a page load/similarly/ in both, but I can't use HTML "Strict", unless Internet Explorer starts to choke (throwing everything to the left edge when I wanted it centered, etc.).

So, as the above post mentioned, you end up writing to Internet Explorer, but you loose compatability with some "text readers for the blind", lynx, etc.

Ah, but who cares if a blind person can read your web page. Well, maybe your web page isn't just a collection of photos, maybe you have something of interest. Then, you should care.

Bottom line, the user will think that you're web page is broken if it doesn't load in I.E., and you loose readers this way. So, you end up with a web page that is a little more sparse, and less feature rich than you wanted.

IE is not expected to see a major revision until Longhorn ships in 2006-2007. It is rumored that the Longhorn version will have tabbed browsing and some kind of pop-up blocking. This would probably be accomplished via the MSN toolbar, which is similar to the Google toolbar but with that *other* search engine.

But the truth is that IE has so much of the market share that revisions don't matter. People tend to use whatever came with their system, even if it is older and came with IE 5. If Microsoft didn't push the patches, quite a few people would be using these older version even now.
BTW, I'm using Firefox.

Mozilla has a small marketshare, practically no one uses it, and finally Long Live IE!

Feeding the troll:You are right. Mozilla's marketshare isn't large. Most Windows users probably don't even know it exists. This doesn't mean they haven't used Mozilla or that Mozilla would be insignificant.

I've seen Mozilla based browsers used in several public web terminals. You will not be able to go to a fair of almost any kind without seeing mozilla used (I've been to quite a few that had little or nothing to do with computers and seen mozilla or a browser using the gecko engine used).

Mozilla will not gain a 95% marketshare today nor tomorrow, but it will gain marketshare. IE will live long, probably a time counted in decades, but Mozilla isn't going away.

I've been following Mozilla closely since milestone 16 and I started using it as my main browser arund version 0.96. Before that it was basically horrible. It was unstable, ate memory like crazy and was too slow for me to use.

Mozilla today is a different beast from the early days:

The most stable (modern) browser I've used (links is the most stable ever)

Best standards support

Getting faster by every release

Getting less resource hungry by every release

The most extendable browser around.

IE will live long but so will Mozilla. Mozilla's marketshare will grow, IE's will probably not. Mozilla is evolving fast, IE is not. Mozilla will always be free, IE might not be. Mozilla will be developed as long as anyone wants to do it or has the money to fund it, IE will not.

All I can say that I hope that the current version of IE lives long and that Microsoft keeps iproving it at the current pace. That will ensure that Mozilla will gain marketshare as it races past IE. Long Live (the current version of) IE

yes, firefox is nothing without the underlying Gecko engine. Shortly firefox will branch on the Mozilla 1.7 branch, it is very likely that Mozilla 1.8-1.9 will have much faster page rendering that Firefox 1.0. See bugzilla for the bugs targetted for 1.8alpha

How can firefox render better, it has the same rendering engine as Mozilla, are you comparing the same Mozilla version as the one which firefox is based one.g, Mozilla 1.6-Firefox 0.8
Mozilla 1.5-Firefox 0.7

Remeber firefox will branch soon from the 1.7 release, so far a while, Mozilla (aka Seamonkey) will have rendering fixes/speedups and Firefox won't have it till it returns back to the trunk sometime after 1.0 is released

I tried Thunderbird for a few days last week... it was so riddled with bugs I found it unusable.

In particular:- massive problems moving/deleting nested mail folders- massive problems importing from another mail client (Eudora)- seems to crash sometimes for no apparent reason- crazy things happened with the preview pane all the time, like it would disappear at random or make itself really, really tiny and refuse to return to its former, big size- some options tied exclusively to a particular account - e.g. filters - making the mail-checking process less transparent if you have multiple/many e-mail accounts- seems to be trying to look a lot like Outlook, which is a shame and unnecessary

I wasn't looking for problems - I WANT to use it, and it has a lot of potential, but right now I'm not gonna use it myself and I couldn't in good conscience recommend it to any non-technical people.

I use Firefox and Thunderbird for all my stuff, but I definitely agree that TB has a way to go. The biggest problem that I've noticed is that occasionally it will just start acting slow, and I have to close it and start it up again.

That said, I love Firefox, and if I'm forced to use IE (say, on someone else's computer), I feel like killing people (its designers, mainly). Is that what they mean by "killer app"?

If you're comparing to IE, then it's not a fair comparison since IE hides some of its memory footprint in explorer and other places and still takes up 12-25 MB for iexplore.exe.

If you're comparing to Konqueror or another KHTML or Gecko browser, then nevermind.

On a related note, is it just me, or does Moz get paged out a LOT quicker than many other apps? Is it playing "too" nice somehow?

I probably don't know what I'm talking about, but if you're using Moz under Windows then the disadvantage is that Moz plays fair. IE, MS Office, Sun Java and Adobe Acrobat Reader I've noticed hang around in RAM a long, long time after you quit using them. I suspect they have settings to stay in memory an extra long time, where I suspect Mozilla plays nice and sets itself to normal and therefore gets squeezed out by the others.

Wait - what sort of person quits Mozilla after firing it up? I usually have at least five Mozilla windows open. The only time I have no Mozilla window open is immediately after a reboot. I suspect that for most users, Mozilla's absolute paging behavior (what happens when you quit it entirely) is a non-issue except how it handles the creation and destruction of additional windows beyond a certain low number.

It's not a secret API. It's MSHTML.DLL, which EXPLORER.EXE (since Win95+IE4 or Win98) and IEXPLORE.EXE both use. It probably uses (documented, non-secret) APIs to create shared r/w data pages for an interprocess in-memory cache. (And, to be fair, if you were writing an embeddable shared-object web browser control meant to be part of 20 apps at once, all owned by the same user, why wouldn't you?)

Heh. Sorry to break it to you, but Moz is not at fault here, it's XP. Now, investingating why it gets swapped out is still an interesting question, but XP does the swapping, not Moz. Which is demonstrates yet another reason i use linux. MUCH better memory management. The only time i remember Moz getting swapped out was when i left my computer compiling for 24 hours, and came back to it. Took about 2 seconds to pull it back. On a p3-700 with 512 MB RAM. just my two cents.

Javascript with timers. The way things are right now [in Mozilla], using even one, unless it's VERY tightly coded, will drive CPU utilization up to 100% and just keep it there. Even when tightly coded, it still eats a massive amount of CPU time.

Be careful when using setInterval() and setTimeout(). Mozilla 1.3 cannot use setTimeout() recursively to create the effect of setInterval() without maxing CPU usage. setInterval() works fine. If you want something to happen at regular intervals, use setInterval() to make all browsers happy.

---One issue where the browsers are different is capturing key events:

[addchar() is a generic function to handle the processing of each key regardless of the browser.][Why did Slashcode add a space within the ECODE tags?]

Luckily both sets of code can be on the same page with the KeyPress event being set correctly without testing for the browser names. I prefer the second method because it allows the code to be contained in a.JS file without modifying the BODY tag. This may have been due to misunderstanding MSDN. There is something called a "named script" (<SCRIPT FOR = object EVENT = onkeypress>) that looks awful and is specific to MSIE. Maybe I just did not find the correct object in MS's DOM to set the onkeypress function for the entire page (maybe document.all.onkeypress?) I stopped researching it once the page worked correctly with both browsers.

To be on-topic:Does Mozilla1.7 allow for the awful event model of MSIE? Will this code still work?